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What Leaders Can Learn From Stand Up To Cancer's Latest Moonshot

Last week a private event was held to introduce Ken Burns’ latest PBS production, “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.” Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, the program will launch with a companion initiative said to be one of the largest educational programs in the history of documentary filmmaking. Elements will include educational materials, screenings and conferences, and a robust digital footprint intended to spearhead a national conversation about the history of cancer.

The program is the latest initiative from the envelope-pushing cancer advocacy organization, Stand Up To Cancer.

Moonshots like Stand Up Cancer’s have been a part of leadership and management vernacular for years, dating back to John F. Kennedy’s inspired call to put a man on the moon. If you seek out other contemporary examples, GoogleGoogle, not surprisingly, rises to the top with its category-creating moves including Android, Google Glass and driverless car R&D.

Google CEO, Larry Page, lives by the “Gospel of 10x” — with an expectation to create products and services ten times better than anything else. He’s not satisfied discovering a few inefficiencies or modest gains. To him, a mere 10 percent improvement means you might as well be doing the same thing as everybody else.

Innovation consultants like Scott D. Anthony and Mark Johnson stress the importance of moonshots to present a vision that offers a meaningful break from past practices, open new markets and inspire teams to do extraordinary things. Given how technology and social connectivity have institutional foundations on constantly shifting ground, you’d think more organizations, and bold leaders within, would follow this script and look closely at how innovators like Google and Stand Up To Cancer deliver on their missions.

Among established institutions, though, moonshots remain exceptionally rare. In the face of increasing pressure to address to new market expectations, many leaders tend to favor incremental adjustments to existing offers, processes and campaigns over legitimately bold moves.

This management incrementalism may become a material liability. According to analyst Mary Meeker, the market cap for radical reinvention, based on the collective market cap for digitally disrupted businesses, is a remarkably huge $36 trillion. While that is undoubtedly a massive amount, it’s still finite. The imagination cap for any institution, though, is infinite. Fortune, influence, and in Stand Up To Cancer’s case, personally transformative change, favor the bold.

For Stand Up to Cancer’s current program, Mukherjee assigned the television and film rights to his book at the urging of the organization’s Co-Founder, Laura Ziskin. Ziskin had hoped to produce a documentary about cancer since the time she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the disease that ultimately took her life.

Stand Up To Cancer’s inspired CEO, Sung Poblete, now has a laser-focus on this big bet, and in the process, aims to elevate the conversation on the brain drain of science talent necessary to make her Dream Team research investments pay off. She is putting her imagination, intensity and connections into overdrive to get it done. According to Poblete, there will be screenings and discussions about the film, as well as curriculum based on the program provided to teachers in high schools, colleges and medical schools across the country.

“Young people, who might have otherwise chosen a career in cancer research, may decide to pursue other career paths altogether,” Poblete said. “This may lead to a lost generation of cancer researchers, and have a significant impact on our ability to reap the clinical benefits of the important discoveries and technological advances of the past several years.”

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